The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [329]
"Writing herself in, signing herself out all in one," Kate whispered, watching. "No! She mustn't forget that."
She gripped my wrist wickedly and we tiptoed out across the breezeway, and stood by the parlor curtain until Kate lifted it, and I saw her smile into the parlor to make watching all right; and perhaps I did the same.
Sister Anne was shaking out her skirt, and white crumbs scattered on the rug. She had managed a slice of that cake. The parlor in its plush was radiant in the spectacular glare of multiplied lights brought close around. The wallpaper of course was red, but now it had a cinnamon cast. Its design had gone into another one—it, too, faded and precise, ringed by rain and of a queerly intoxicating closeness, like an old trunk that has been opened still again for the children to find costumes. White flags and amaryllis in too big a vase, where they parted themselves in the middle and tried to fall out, were Sister Anne's idea of what completed the mantel shelf. The fireplace was banked with privet hedge, as for a country wedding. I could almost hear a wavery baritone voice singing "0 Promise Me."
One with his camera and flash apparatus, the photographer stood with his back to us. He was baldheaded. We could see over him; he was short, and he leaned from side to side. He had long since discarded his coat, and his suspenders crossed tiredly on that bent back.
Sister Anne sat one way, then the other. A variety of expressions traveled over her face—pensive, eager, wounded, sad, and businesslike.
"I don't know why she can't make up her mind," I said all at once. "She's done nothing but practice all afternoon."
"Wait, wait, wait," said Kate. "Let her get to it."
What would show in the picture was none of Mingo at all, but the itinerant backdrop—the same old thing, a scene that never was, a black and white and gray blur of unrolled, yanked-down moonlight, weighted at the bottom with the cast-iron parlor rabbit doorstop, just behind Sister Anne's restless heel. The photographer raised up with arms extended, as if to hold and balance Sister Anne just exactly as she was now, with some special kind of semaphore. But Sister Anne was not letting him off that easily.
"Just a minute—I feel like I've lost something!" she cried, in a voice of excitement. "My handkerchief?"
I could feel Kate whispering to me, sideways along my cheek.
"Did poor Uncle Felix have to kill somebody when he was young?"
"I don't know." I shrugged, to my own surprise.
"Do you suppose she told him today there was a Yankee in the house? He might be thinking of Yankees." Kate slanted her whisper into my hair. It was more feeling, than hearing, what she said. "But he was almost too young for killing them....Of course he wasn't too young to be a drummer boy...." Her words sighed away.
I shrugged again.
"Mama can tell us! I'll make her tell us. What did the note say, did it go on just warning us to hide?"
I shook my head. But she knew I must have looked at it.
"Tell you when we get out," I whispered back, stepping forward a little from her and moving the curtain better.
"Oh, wait!" Sister Anne exclaimed again.
I could never have cared, or minded, less how Sister Anne looked. I had thought of what was behind the photographer's backdrop. It was the portrait in the house, the one picture on the walls of Mingo, where pictures ordinarily would be considered frivolous. It hung just there on the wall that was before me, crowded between the windows, high up—the romantic figure of a young lady seated on a fallen tree under brooding skies: my Great-grandmother Jerrold, who had been Evelina Mackaill.
And I remembered—rather, more warmly, knew, like a secret of the family—that the head of this black-haired, black-eyed lady who always looked the right, mysterious age to be my sister, had been fitted to the ready-made portrait by the painter who had called at the